The world hasn't been kind to Sun for quite a while now, but with the economic downturn, things are getting worse. Sun announced today that it will be laying off 18% of its workforce, or about 6000 people. In addition, it was announced that Sun's software chief Rich Green has resigned for reasons that were not stated, although as part of Sun's reorganization and cost cutting efforts, many departments are being merged, and the software division is being restructured and reorganized.

Another point of keeping the clock frequency low, is that a CPU consumes power proportional to the square of the frequency, if my memory serves me correctly.

If you want to keep power consumption low, the most important factor is to keep the clock frequency low. Due to physical laws. And SUN is doing that.

Genius. Imagine the difficult constraints in a world of high frequency CPUs, when SUN was constructing the new family of CPUs: Fast AND low power consumption. How do you combine that? Fast and low power, at the same time?

Well, due to physical laws, you have to keep the frequency down. Ok, lets do that. How do we get speed, if we need low frequency? Many core with virtually no cache misses (an intel x86 server idles 50% under full load due to cache misses, Niagara almost never idles). Do that and you get... Niagara! The key point is "never idle waiting for cache misses". Everyone has multi cores, but the faster the CPU, the higher the latency with a cache miss. IBM Power6 at 4.7 GHz must have the worst penalty upon cache miss, of all existing CPUs due to their high frequency. That is the reason Power6 are comparatively slow. To crank up the frequency is the wrong way to go, this was apparent long time ago. IBM hasnt realised it yet.